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And the Best Picture Should Be…

Nine critics make their cases for each of this year's Best Picture nominees—even you, Hacksaw Ridge.

Feb 25, 2017

This year, nine films have received nominations for Hollywood's most prestigious award—a glut of cinematic riches, one might say, or maybe just too many movies to have strong opinions about. Let's go ahead and assume each of these films has a shot at Oscar gold and that if La La Land isn't totally going to win everything. We asked nine writers to make the case for why each Best Picture nominee should join the ranks of great (and sometimes not-so-great) films that have earned the Academy's top prize, even though eight of them are doomed to be wrong.

Paramount Pictures

Arrival

The Oscars have been more accepting of prestige sci-fi films the past few years, but none have actually copped a Best Picture statue. Matt Miller argues that should end now.

Going to the movies was hardly an escapist experience in 2016. For the most part, especially during awards season, movies tended to be as stressful as the real world. Yet Arrival manages to evoke complex human emotion while not being a total goddamn bummer in the end. And in the process, Denis Villenueve's sci-fi opus finds the unique balance of commenting on modern society while staying removed from any specific current event or issue, all while hitting its marks as a genre exercise.

Amy Adams plays Louise Banks, a brilliant linguist called upon to translate mysterious beings that visit Earth. They arrive silently in 12 places around the globe in massive obsidian-black egg vessels that the audience doesn't even clearly see until 20 minutes into the film. She's joined by Jeremy Renner, her sexy theoretical physicist sidekick, to enter the ship every 18 hours in an attempt to figure out two things: Where are they from, and what do they want?

As the scientists learn to understand the circular, non-linear orthography of the heptapods, we learn the truth about Arrival's non-linear framework. Like the heptapods' written language, Arrival is told without a beginning or an end. When Louise wakes up at night dreaming of her late daughter, she is actually seeing the future. Her daughter is born and dies after the aliens leave Earth, although the film's structure would lead you to believe that all happens before the events we see take place.

Arrival takes risks with storytelling that are rare with big blockbuster movies.

It's hard to pinpoint any one single a-ha moment when the audience starts to understand along with Louise that her memories are jumping back and forth in time. But given this structure, Adams' performance—which somehow did not earn her a Best Actress nomination—takes on a second layer of beauty. Louise isn't a woman wracked with memories of loss; she is a woman watching her daughter die for the first time. In terms of filmmaking that fucks with timelines, Arrival deserves to be on the list with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Memento. It takes risks with storytelling that are rare with big blockbuster movies.

And Villeneuve achieves this with elegance. The warmth of Louise's "memories" of her daughter contrast the otherworldly alien object and the rigid, clinical insides of the temporary military camp. The egg-like ships invade the grand and beautiful nature shots of a Montana valley. At its heart, this is a nerdy linguistics movie, which Villeneuve elevates to an entirely different experience using a number of subtle, intricate, and graceful filmmaking tools.

Before 2009, when the Academy expanded the Best Picture category, only three sci-fi films had been nominated: A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, and E.T. (Purists wouldn't count The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which won Best Picture in 2003.) Since then, Avatar, District 9, Inception, Gravity, Her, and Mad Max: Fury Road have all made the cut for Best Picture nominations. Yet after eight years, sci-fi is overdue for a win (one that should have come with Her or Mad Max: Fury Road). This is more than an alien movie—there just happen to be aliens involved.

Paramount Pictures

Fences

The pantheon of Broadway plays that make the jump to immortal movie classics is shockingly small. Manuel Betancourt suggests that August Wilson's long-gestating adaptation has earned its spot and deserves the ultimate coronation.

Fences is one of the best stage-to-screen adaptations in recent memory. That may sound like a backhanded compliment considering how often films based on widely lauded Broadway plays flounder when making the transition, but it just highlights how Denzel Washington's treatment of August Wilson's 1987 Pulitzer-prize winning play deserves to be talked about alongside films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Streetcar Named Desire, which kept intact the power of their stage-bound properties while making them instant Hollywood classics.

That it took 30 years to bring Wilson's story of a sanitation worker named Troy Maxson living in Pittsburgh in the 1950s to the big screen only further stresses how much of a miracle this film is. Fences not only honors Wilson's conviction that it needed to be helmed by an African-American director, but pays tribute to his creations with incandescent performances by the likes of Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Russell Hornsby, and Mykelti Williamson—all reprising their roles from the Tony-winning 2010 Broadway revival.

That it took 30 years to bring Wilson's story to the big screen only further stresses how much of a miracle this film is.

If the case is to be made about why Fences deserves to win Best Picture this Sunday, it should be built on the strength first and foremost of Wilson's earthy yet poetic dialogue. "I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams… and I buried them inside you," Davis's Rose Maxson tearfully tells Troy in one of the film's most affecting scenes. Focused on Troy's daily grind and the seemingly mundane interactions he has with his doting wife, his carefree son, and his loyal best friend, Fences soars because Wilson is able to infuse these moments with the weight of history and poetry; Troy's betrayal of Rose, and her heart-wrenching rebuttal of his sexist attempts at validating his own mistakes, becomes a powerful indictment of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the unsung stories of many men and women who tried to make the best of what was given to them. Add in the fact that Fences deals with a blue-collar African-American household, and you cannot help but wish to reward it in hopes that other stories like it are told and shared with the world.

Above all else, Fences is a film that captures the quiet dignity of its characters. Taking a cue from Wilson's dialogue, Washington's direction finds grace in the most mundane of moments: Rose absent-mindedly wiping flour off her face, Cory dejectedly putting on his football helmet, Troy's brother Gabe silently eating a sandwich at their mother's grave.

In accepting a BAFTA for her performance, Viola Davis brought up her father as a way to pinpoint why Fences struck a chord with her. Having only learned to read when he was 15 and becoming a janitor late in his life, Davis's father exists for her in the world that Fences so powerfully depicts. She often wondered whether his life mattered. "And August Wilson answered that question beautifully," she proclaimed. "Because he said that our lives mattered as African-Americans—the horse groomer, the sanitation worker, the people who grew up under the heavy boot of Jim Crow, the people who did not make it into history books."

The story of Troy, Rose, and Cory Maxson is a reminder that whose stories get told is a political decision—in this it echoes fellow Best Picture nominees Hidden Figures and Moonlight, which recover and retell narratives that so often get dismissed or disavowed as lesser than. For its grace and its beauty, for its power and its politics, Fences deserves a chance to win big this weekend, if only so that more Troy and Rose Maxsons feel seen, feel loved.

Summit Entertainment

Hacksaw Ridge

A flawed, patriotic, conservative project overseen by a man best known for racist and sexist behavior is competing for Oscar's top honor. Tyler Coates asks: Should you expect anything less from 2017?

Less than two months into 2017, a year already filled with frustration, despair, and befuddlement, it seems only appropriate that a film by noted bigot Mel Gibson be in the running for Hollywood's top honor. Just a decade after his infamous fall from grace—an DUI arrest coupled with a recording of gleeful anti-Semitic remarks—Gibson has returned in good standing with a Best Director nomination to boot for a film that ticks off all the Academy's requirements to appeal to the right-leaning viewers who might tune into Sunday night's protest to hate-watch any political speeches from A-list Oscar winners.

Hacksaw Ridge might be the most conservative film of this year's nine Best Picture nominees, not just in politics but also in technique. This one has everything: World War II (although with no evil Nazis in sight), all-American imagery pulled straight from a Norman Rockwell painting, and a lesson about religious tolerance. Its hero, Desmond Doss (played by Andrew Garfield), achieves greatness despite his very clear struggle: as a Seventh Day Adventist, his faith precludes him from physically fighting in battle (or even handling a rifle). That doesn't keep him from serving his country, however, and he jumps at the chance to flee the bum-fuckery of Lynchburg, Virginia to enlist in the Army with the intention to serve as a combat medic.

The twist, of course, is that his comrade in arms—and his superiors, played by Sam Worthington and Vince Vaughn (the latter, ironically, being the only American in the cast of this very patriotic film)—pose an initial threat to his existence. His faith puts them at risk; if he can't fight alongside them, how can he fight for them? After being dragged through the mud in basic training (brutal boot camp montage: check), Doss must defend himself—and his faith—before an army tribunal to make the case for his role among his fellow soldiers. It's your typical Hallmark Channel fare, only with a bigger budget and a more famous star.

Hacksaw Ridge is your typical Hallmark Channel fare, only with a bigger budget and a more famous star.

That's when Gibson pulls his bait-and-switch. After a plodding 45 minutes, at the end of which we learn a lesson about religious expression, we finally get a taste of the World War II movie Gibson has been longing to make for years. Replacing the swords and catapults from his previous Oscar-winning war epic Braveheart with machine guns, grenades, and flamethrowers, the remaining hour and a half of Hacksaw Ridge is an onslaught of violent imagery—limbs explode, but so do faces; one is left unable to identify any of the good guys who are left standing (or crawling, missing said limbs).

By the end of the film, it doesn't matter which of the supporting characters make it off the battlefield. And despite the fact that Doss received the Medal of Honor (the first conscientious objector to do so) for going above and beyond in the line of duty to serve his country and his fellow soldiers is as much of a red herring as the film's first act. Hacksaw Ridge is a film about individualism, about standing apart from a crowd and earning what's yours before considering the other. It's perhaps the most American aspect of the film—the underdog manages to defeat his fellow man before miraculously surviving a battle against his enemy.

Mel Gibson also believes he has God on his side, and maybe that belief has encouraged others to look past his flaws—and the flaws of his film—to open the gates to Hollywood to him once again. And should that be a surprise? Hollywood—and the Academy—often sets aside the bad behavior of accomplished men, favoring the artist's work over the artist's misdeeds. Should Hacksaw Ridge pull an upset on Sunday, it'll only reiterate the Academy's status quo—and mirror the world at large, one that favors men in power no matter who they step over in order to obtain it.

CBS Films

Hell or High Water

David Mackenzie turns the western genre on its head for the Trump age. Judy Berman explains how it examines what to means to be an American in these disorienting times.

I am certainly not the first to discern that, not far beneath its cops-and-robbers surface, Hell or High Water is a meditation on rural American life after the financial crisis of 2008. By now you've probably heard how the film's characters represent "Trump's America." There's the smug racism of Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges), an aging white Ranger on the verge of retirement, and then there's the sheer desperation of Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) in their criminal exploits to save their family's land. Nevertheless, this is not just a story about white people and economic anxiety. At its core, the film demonstrates how personal misery, socioeconomic oppression, and the absence of class consciousness in the United States make us confused about who our real allies and enemies are. Hell or High Water deserves an Oscar for Best Picture because it was 2016's best film about what it means to be an American in these disorienting times.

Westerns have always mirrored the way Americans see themselves, both by positioning cowboys as paragons of rugged individualism and sorting characters into good guys (white heroes in white hats) and bad guys (Native Americans, Mexicans, white outlaws in black hats). The "us vs. them" symbolism found in the low-budget westerns from the first half of the 20th century was so clear that both white and minority audiences could easily recognize where they stood in these worlds.

In the decades following World War II, America began to see itself less as a maverick upstart on the global stage and more as the wealthy, hegemonic power it had become. At the same time, the nascent Civil Rights Movement sparked a nationwide reckoning over straight, white, male supremacy that still hasn't been resolved. By the 1960s, so-called revisionist westerns such as Martin Ritt's Hud, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had emerged and reflected these shifts. Suddenly, outlaws could be heroes. The violence in these films intensified, growing less righteous and more nihilistic. And in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, white men invading Native American and Mexican territory no longer seemed to be fulfilling manifest destiny—they had become symbols of American imperialism.

What unites Hell or High Water's characters is more important than what divides them.

Hell or High Water may be part of this tradition, but its also feels fresh and urgent. Instead of merely inverting traditional good guy/bad guy or white hero/outsider villain dichotomies, director David Mackenzie constantly drops hints that what unites his characters is more important than what divides them.

The film is, ultimately, a battle between two sets of heroes trapped by old, western archetypes—which is to say, outdated ideas about American identity and morality. In pursuing the Howard brothers, the cops are simply doing their job . Although their spree of bank robberies does eventually leave innocent people dead, the Howards only take such extreme action because it's the one way they can think of to not only survive, but exact justice. Tanner may get off on his outlaw exploits, but when he sacrifices himself in the film's final standoff, it's so Toby can escape and do right by his sons.

The shootout that ensues when the brothers part ways feels so inevitable and futile and sad precisely because it pits two sympathetic factions against each other and leaves the only remaining villain in this story—the Texas Midlands Bank—maddeningly impervious. Even Marcus understands, on some level, that the bank, not its robbers, is the source of everyone's misery. "That looks like a man who could foreclose on a house," Marcus says upon spotting one branch's manager.

We don't find out whether Marcus decides to punish him—the way traditional values dictate that he should—or let him go free. It doesn't seem like a stretch to suggest that Marcus is left with the same big question America at large is currently litigating: Can an old-fashioned cowboy abandon his superficial notions about good guys and bad guys, "us" and "them," to start fighting the real enemy?

20th Century Fox

Hidden Figures

Every now and then, an honest-to-goodness crowdpleaser enters the Oscars fold. Jake Kring-Schreifels thinks this box-office smash has earned the honor of the year's best film.

Midway through Hidden Figures, Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson), an African-American mathematician who's been summoned to NASA's all-white Space Task Force, shows off her recently acquired security clearance to her two best friends, Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer). "You can get to the moon and back with that thing," Jackson says, referring to the new badge with wonder. "Just not to the bathroom," replies Goble, who has spent arguably more energy sprinting a half mile across campus to the colored bathroom each day than she has computing numbers.

The musical imagery and time focused on this daily 40-minute mad-heeled-dash provides one of the film's sharp contrasts. Goble's genius has elevated her status and promoted the meritocratic environment (a product of potential global catastrophe) that slowly permeates throughout NASA's Hampton, Virginia, hallways. And yet, when nature calls, Goble's brown skin regains its relevance, meeting the societal segregation of the 1960s that fueled divisiveness in an era that needed unity. It is a confrontation that Hidden Figures attacks with the positive and persistent problem-solving nature of its undaunted protagonists.

They, above all, are the reason that Hidden Figures deserves to win Best Picture this Sunday. Which is to say that the film's director, Theodore Melfi, trusts in the inherent entertainment (and educative) value of watching three intelligent women—played by equally charismatic performers—chip away at prejudice and advance their careers even within the conventional confines of a collective biopic. It's an effective, if not predictable, way to tell a story that's hardly been heard, even if, technically and aesthetically speaking, Hidden Figures doesn't achieve what its other nominated counterparts do.

Though, it's not necessarily trying to. This is not a film mired in bleak depictions of humanity or the wrenching heartache of dreamers and lovers intent on finding their place in the universe. Melfi has created a lighter, economical film that bursts with optimism but is still grounded in hard work and perseverance. His leading ladies smile but get their hands dirty, and it's a joy to watch.

Hidden Figures is a film that bursts with optimism but is still grounded in hard work and perseverance.

It's been well known the Academy loves a good true story (take a look at recent winners), or at least a story "based on true events"—the kind of language that precedes a film so that it can dramatize the more mundane aspects of the past. But Hidden Figures, like its title suggests, finds its strengths in its daily mathematical and procedural monotonies, and suggests their fertile importance in today's reactionary climate. These women continued to solve their own problems through inventive, painstaking ways.

These were not grand gestures but practical, persistent steps of progress, the kind of tactical and tangible change the Oscars should celebrate and hold up as a mirror to the country. It argues that no accomplishments ever take place without the unheralded, the forgotten, and the neglected.

It would be misguided and unfair to claim that the film's nominations, and previous awards season victories, are attached to the guilt of last year's #OscarsSoWhite controversy. That would be to dismiss its intrinsic achievements as well as its popular appeal (it's made more than $140 million since it opened in late December). Besides its patriotic virtues and re-engaged romance with math and science, a victory Sunday night would also bridge the growing discord between Academy voters and the movie-going population.

After all, recent history has suggested to the major studios that films like Hidden Figures go unseen and are quickly dismissed, hitting their targeted demographics without much extended cultural impact. And yet, here is a lucrative, buzzed-about film that doesn't rely on capes, fairy tales, or added numerals to established franchises—just three black women with brains and the guts to use them. An Oscar might not heal the wounds from last year or prevent more hashtags and boycotts from taking place in the future, but it will send a message to those in charge of cataloguing the multiplex: It's worth investing in more stories that portray black Americans as heroic people, and not just the victims and often-violent redeemers of injustice. That, at least, shouldn't be rocket science.

Summit Entertainment

La La Land

Yes, it's probably going to win. But the reason why it shouldn't isn't its fetishization of classic holiday musicals, or its soliloquies about "real jazz." According to Elisabeth Donnelly, it's the definitive millennial romance.

La La Land is a movie rooted in so much simplicity that it's hard to write about it on a grander scale. Essentially a two-hander about a girl and a boy—Mia (Emma Stone), a wannabe actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), who dreams of reviving "real" jazz—La La Land comes on like an all-singing-and-all-dancing Hollywood musical inspired by the greats like Singin' in the Rain. But it's really a moody little piece pondering the overachiever's lament: When you're pursuing nearly impossible, wildly ambitious dreams, can you find the room for love? The movie's victory is so pre-ordained that its detractors have already skipped ahead to being mad about it. But what makes the movie truly worthy of the Best Picture award it will get on Sunday isn't that it romanticizes the past, it's that it uses that nostalgia as a Trojan horse to deliver what is actually the ultimate millennial romance.

Mia and Sebastian have some chemistry thanks to the charm of Stone and Gosling, and as they sing together in the lovely Griffith Park dance-scene, lit by the glorious tones of Los Angeles Magic Hour, something enchanting occurs: Mia and Sebastian in matching wingtips, dancing together, falling in love. You can build most of a film off the scaffolding of Stone and Gosling's star power, and they stick out of the crowd in bright colors and impeccable suiting. In the dizzying heights of their infatuation, they're literally waltzing through the universe, borne aloft by their love.

But Mia and Sebastian aren't just dreamers; they're fusty folks dedicated to a certain kind of art that already seems obsolete. Mia wants the glamour of acting in the sort of movie that involves back lots and whole worlds, and Sebastian wants to be playing the sort of authentic jazz that had its moment of appreciation back when Miles Davis was scoring Elevator to the Gallows. While they may be soulmates in their dedication to artistic purity and beautiful vision of the world, well: They have to pay rent. For Sebastian, this involves a touring musician job in his old friend's band. The old friend is John Legend, who looks good in a mustard-yellow turtleneck, sings like a dream, and looks at art with the wisdom of an actual grown man (he manages to evolve the living, breathing genre of jazz so that he can make money, god forbid), so Sebastian's protestations ring hollow.

La La Land uses nostalgia as a Trojan horse to deliver what is actually the ultimate millennial romance.

Meanwhile, Mia is putting on a one-woman show, marinating in her insecurity, turning a lamp on and off on a stage. Can love possibly stand up to this ambition, when the boy and girl sound so nice together singing, "City of stars / Are you shining just for me?"

The answer is likely "no." While the obvious musical references come from the great technicolor, saccharine American musicals, director Damien Chazelle is really making a bummer musical à la Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in which the score is lovely and soothing, the parlays into song are surprising and winsome, and despite all this surface pleasure, the note underneath is one of melancholy. Mia and Sebastian could have a great love story, the sort that leads to dream ballets and waltzes in Paris and making your vision board's dreams come true. But life, as it is wont to do, will get in the way.

When a work of art nails the ending, the viewer is far more likely to walk out wowed. La La Land nails the ending, finding a brand-new emotion in its millennial stew. Time passes for Mia and Sebastian, and they've achieved, in short time, something resembling their goals and dreams. A grown-up Mia, a full-fledged movie star, goes back to the coffee shop where she toiled years earlier, a glamorous vision for the young barista. She has a cute husband (and a baby), and the pair ends up, by total coincidence, in Sebastian's jazz club. Seeing Sebastian leads Mia into a reverie of the life that they could've had—through an extended dream ballet, of course. Maybe Stone and Gosling don't land the moves quite like Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly, but they still manage to dip their toes into the metaphorical La La Land before returning the grimy, grounded one in which they permanently reside.

People see millennials as entitled because they want to romantically hold out for the right job; for Mia and Sebastian, work will win out over love, timing rules with an iron fist, and because of that, their life will go down a prescribed path. Work is the love story here, but there is a warning and a moral: Mia and Sebastian have lost something in their breakup, and in another ethereal world, their love story can go on. But down here, they're just fools who dream about the past while moving forward in the present.

The Weinstein Company

Lion

A film that reminds us that the Internet is a place through which to connect with our past rather than find torment and strife? It gets Nojan Aminosharei's vote.

I don't call my mother enough. In fact, I have a week-old voicemail from her that I have yet to respond to. But I sure as hell called her after seeing Lion. Movies uncover our own world in ways that deeply resonate with our own experiences, open us up to the experiences of our fellow humans, and generally help us see what's right in front of us. The true story portrayed in Lion represents the latter, and the film achieved this better than any other movie of 2016.

Lion opens in 1986 and introduces us to five-year-old Saroo, a wisp of a boy (played with heart-swelling cuteness by little Sunny Pawar), looks like the tiniest flea hopping through dusty Khandwa, India alongside his brother. He's lost in that stretch of topography—and amid the bustle of Khandwa. He's separated from his brother Guddu when he follows him out one night; after falling asleep on an outbound train that he presumes his brother has boarded, he awakens to find himself in a whole new world. Stranded in the claustrophobic scramble of Calcutta, his childlike stature is again used as visual shorthand, only this time for his helplessness, unmoored in this sea of people.

Twenty years later, Saroo (now played by Dev Patel)—triggered by the sight of jalebi, a deep fried sweet from his childhood—gets the urge to retrace his steps from that long-ago train journey on the then-newly released Google Earth. This technological marvel leads him on a years-old search, a painstakingly piecemeal effort to follow the breadcrumbs in his memory to a village the name of which he doesn't know. He alienates himself from his adopted parents, Sue and John Brierley (the former played by a refreshingly warm Nicole Kidman)—but unlike in his childhood, his separation from his family doesn't leave him lost as they never untether their support.

We know that this real-life fairy tale has a happy ending, but knowing Saroo's destination before he does only hastens our excitement.

Saroo Brierly's story has been told before in news clippings and in A Long Way Home, the book he co-wrote with writer Larry Buttrose. We know that this real-life fairy tale has a happy ending long before the movie begins, but knowing Saroo's destination before he does only hastens our excitement for him to get there.

The movie, as many reviews have noted, doesn't break any boundaries. It doesn't move the needle of filmmaking as a form, but it confidently threads that needle and reaches as platonic of an ideal you can reach for an inspiring true story well told. It's sentimental, but neither saccharine nor maudlin. Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us of the Internet's virtues at a time when many of us are ready to yank out the cord and disconnect.

And when Saroo finally does find his lost home, and in it—his biological mother—he weeps for the alternate life he missed. But he then promptly calls his adoptive family to celebrate with them, and to tell Sue that she will always be the woman who raised and nurtured him—that she will always be his mother.

Lion is about how even as our world shrinks, our capacity for love abounds and expands. And it's a reminder, too, to hold onto the things we take for granted and value the connections we have built throughout our lives. (Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a phone call to make.)

Amazon Studios

Manchester by the Sea

Widely considered 2017's bummer masterpiece, one important aspect that should put this movie over the top, keeps getting overlooked. As Michael Tedder points out, it's also pretty funny.

Almost as soon as it debuted, Manchester by the Sea gained a reputation as a bleak, heartbreaking tour de force. That's not an inaccurate description, but it is a limiting one. Kenneth Lonergan's story of a broken man dealing with profound loss who, against his wishes, is forced to re-engage with the world is sad—but it's also often disarmingly amusing. As the nephew Casey Affleck's Lee Chandler is pressured into looking after, Lucas Hedges gives the movie a wry energy that keeps the proceedings from getting too dour. He's dealing with his own profound loss, and he's coping by trying to distract himself with the most teenager pursuits possible: playing in a terrible band and trying to get laid.

The push and pull between Casey Affleck and Hedges—particularly whenever Patrick tries to pressure his uncle into acting as his wingman—is Lonergan's way of demonstrating that even when surrounded by despair, life has a funny way of going on.

Manchester by the Sea offers an incisive look at a type of masculinity that requires pushing one's feelings beyond arm's length—and its destructive result.

Affleck underplays Lee's pain, letting the tiniest gestures indicate the wounded soul trying to emerge from a wall of grief. But while Manchester by the Sea explores grief, it also interrogates American repression.

The film doesn't offer a traditional happy ending—that'd ring hollow following two hours of a slow-building emotional onslaught. But we do see in the film's final moments a sense that Lee's time with Patrick—and his own reflections on the nature of tragedy and grief—has put him on the road to becoming more of a person again.

Manchester by the Sea offers an incisive look at a type of masculinity that requires pushing one's feelings beyond arm's length—and its destructive result. Lonergan delicately explores the full range of human emotion and shows us what life looks like when we limit ourselves, all without hitting a false note or losing his sense of humor. It's a high-wire act of storytelling and empathy, and that's what makes Manchester by the Sea the film most deserving of Best Picture.

A24

Moonlight

Barry Jenkins' quiet masterpiece asks of its audience to find themselves in its protagonist's fractured lives. Nico Lang considers that its greatest strength.

Moonlight was the best American movie of 2016, but it remains a long shot to go all the way on Oscar night. Moonlight asks viewers to dig deep into its protagonist's life in order to find a semblance of their own identity; it's not meant as escapism, as certain scenes in Barry Jenkins' film appear to be burdened with the weight of all humanity. Given the intense gravity of the past year, it's almost difficult to begrudge Academy members their desire to ignore the truths which Moonlight asks us to bear witness.

But to ignore Moonlight isn't just to repeat the mistakes of years past, including the last year's #OscarsSoWhite controversy. In Trump's America, giving the film is proper due is absolutely imperative. The current president ran on a platform of making America great again, a promise that the nation would be returned to days of former glory. Moonlight is a necessary rebuke to that slogan: America has never been great for black boys like Chiron, for whom the nation's alleged dreams are a waking nightmare.

But what makes Moonlight unique and extraordinary isn't just the young man at its center. The low-budget indie is an honest-to-god miracle, a singular masterpiece that's a testament to the transformative power of film during an era when television is increasingly viewed as our predominant artistic medium. To witness Moonlight is to be changed by it, as well as to be reminded that cinema has the power to bring the world a little closer together.

To witness Moonlight is to be changed by it, as well as to be reminded that cinema has the power to bring the world a little closer together.

The coming-of-age movie is a well-trod genre, but Moonlight refuses to offer easy answers in regards to its protagonist's struggle of becoming. Jenkins' screenplay tells Chiron's story in three chapters. Viewers meet eight-year-old Chiron (first played by Alex R. Hibbert), hiding in an abandoned house from his bullies, unable to speak—but he knows enough to ask his adoptive father figure, Juan (Mahershala Ali), about the unseen force that makes him different. ("What's a faggot?" he asks.) In the second chapter, he's a teenager (Ashton Sanders) bruised by years of torment at the hands of his peers and impassioned by the forbidden attraction to his classmate. The final sequence of the film takes on the quiet air of tragedy. To survive in a world where many queer people at the margins live in constant fear of violence, he hardens himself. Chiron, now played by Trevante Rhodes, becomes like the boys who abused him.

Moonlight explores the consequences of that marginalization, what the men who make themselves untouchable to keep from being destroyed give up in the process. And the film allows its audience to go through Chiron's journey along with him; Jenkins' camera is observational without resorting to a chilly distance. Moonlight puts the viewer as close as possible to experiencing the world from its protagonist's perspective; its universe is lived in rather than detached.

Moonlight offers its lead absolution and even hope in its final moments, and the Academy has the same opportunity: to be redeemed by walking in someone else's shoes. Empathy is a seemingly simple act, but it's never been more important.

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